Business networks occur in many aspects of commerce. Each business network includes a set of participants, such as people, organizations, companies, who collaborate in various ways to conduct business. For example, the business involves manufacturing, storing, distributing or servicing goods, or delivering a product or service to a customer. Many of such participants have implemented enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems and other application systems for these purposes, to support their internal processes. For example, cross-organizational activities related to service delivered by the business network can interface with (or run within) application systems of one or more participants. Some business network participants may use additional information systems and information technology (IT)-based process orchestrations to deliver the service.
Business processes running end-to-end in a business network are executed on local systems of various participants. Today, participants who wish to enable end-to-end business network operations and provide visibility into business network performance may need to implement costly, risky and time-consuming projects to deliver process integration into local applications. In the context of business networks, this business-IT dilemma may be exaggerated by a disconnect within participating organizations between, on the one hand, their individual IT situation, and on the other, their business language. The cost and complexity is further multiplied by the number of participants who must collaborate in a business network to achieve a common goal. This number ranges from fifty (at the low end) to many hundred in some enterprise settings. For each participant, the integration, operation and visibility needs to be addressed case-by-case, covering the end-to-end flow of business information and values, from activities within the private domain of one participant (e.g., the solicitation of a quote) to the partner's corresponding business activities (e.g., the confirmation of an order) and follow-up activities by related participants (e.g., production orders, shipping advice, etc.). Each partner-to-partner collaboration in the network needs to be implemented against autonomously designed information systems and integration technologies.
Generally, bringing information system support to a business network requires that mutual knowledge be acquired about the global view of the business network, or in a sense, of the network fabric. Most often, the required knowledge for such an integration is distributed over multiple people in the organization. Typically, no single person has an end-to-end understanding of the business processes, organizations and IT landscape of their own organization, let alone those of all the involved participants. This lack of knowledge and the disconnect between participants (and their business and IT organizations) hinders the effective delivery of information system support for the collaborative business activities and business network lifecycle events. For example, effective support requires managing the evolution of the information system and business process operations, such as: on- or off-boarding participants, modifying process steps or information exchange, creating process variants due to regional or contractual variations, changing contracts regarding business rules and service level agreements (SLAs), ensuring continuous operations, and performing business optimization.
Some existing solutions perform modeling of business processes. For example, Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) is a graphical notation that depicts the steps in a business process.